ORPHEE recast a myth in terms of a detective story pulp fiction. VERTIGO raises a detective story pulp fiction to the levels of myth. The film has elements of re-incarnation, eros, morbid doom and it makes transparent the functioning and illusory nature of the myth but it still has the effect of a mythical story. It has this dream like sensibility whereas with Cocteau he modernized the story made it totally accessible and still showed how timeless the story was.

Hitch, after choosing a setting, would ask, “What do they have in…” be it Switzerland, London or New York. So Vertigo was specifically written to exploit California as a setting. The novel specifies an old church, which they wouldn’t have had, but they have plenty of old missions, and that led him to think of San Francisco as a centrepoint, and brought in the Spanish part of the story (early drafts kept the name Pauline Lagerlac from the novel, before Carlotta Valdes was invented).

The Lady Eve connection is funny — I guess both films have the same odd two-part structure, but in the Sturges we know what Stanwyck knows right from the start, whereas Hitchcock confines us to Stewart’s POV for two thirds of the story.